Marvin

schlack said:

Now, if they would create a self-powered version, like an automatic watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch), that would be killer. Endless battery life for non-stationary objects.

That would be good, even a wind-up mechanism would be ok and can be combined with kinetic charging. The power needing stored is very small, given that a CR2032 battery lasts 6-12 months.

Removing the battery would make the AirTags much smaller. They could provide a winding device to recharge them to avoid having to do it by hand. It wouldn't matter if the lifespan was less than with a battery if it was easy enough to recharge them.

Or they could add wireless charging where sticking them to the back of an iPhone or a charging mat would charge up a sealed battery.

timmillea said:

Yes, apart from Jony Ive's deep, monotone voice, it was a very interesting listen. I didn't like his choice of music, other than the recording of his 5 year old son (a first of Desert Island Discs), but that is what Desert Island Discs is all about. Discovery!

I very much got the impression that once Steve Jobs died, Jony Ive had to leave Apple. Steve and Jony were close friends, co-mentors and collaborators. Tim Cook is only a logistics guy and resented the power that Jony Ive had at Apple - equal with the ceo. As the Jim Reeves' song goes, "He'll Have to Go". 

I am sure that Steve Jobs would have been in two minds as to his preferred successor - Tim Cook or Jony Ive. I think he made the wrong decision. 

I liked his music choices, nice to see some Bananarama appreciation.

There are always 'what if' scenarios people think about but the reality would have been very different.

"interviewer: Why was it time to go?
Jony: If there's one thing that's inevitable, it's that we do go, the question is just when. It was just the right time. As a team, we had finished a lot of the things we'd been working on for a long time. It wasn't a difficult decision, it was a difficult transition having been at Apple for nearly 30 years.
interviewer: If Steve had still been there, would you have taken that decision?
Jony: I can't imagine being somewhere else and him being somewhere else. I would be working with him now if he was alive."

Steve Jobs would have been 70 now, who knows if he would have stayed that long as CEO. It doesn't matter how much people care about their work, other priorities come up in life like family and taking some time to enjoy the time they have left. Jony Ive has his own family to spend time with.

People also get the impression that there would have been a whole slew of innovations but there's very little left for them to do that Apple hasn't already done or attempted. Maybe Steve would have made a cooler AR headset but he saw the design for the one they made. More likely they wouldn't have launched it until it was more refined. Maybe they would have been able to manufacture a car, maybe not.

When it comes to running a company like Apple, it is a publicly-owned company. This is a bad company structure for people like Steve Jobs and Jony Ive because they are beholden to someone else whose motivation is profit rather than an ideal. Jony Ive would hate running a company that had to answer to finance people like Blackrock and Vanguard, people who are so cynical about the value of their work beyond marketing. He is much better off running his own company and he can always take design jobs for Apple if he wants to while being able to work on a much broader range of products and materials.

He clearly misses having someone who has the unique ability to appreciate good design while being able to follow it through on production without compromise. Steve Jobs was one of a kind but journeys don't last forever, they followed it through to the end.

charlesn said:

The SE selling proposition was certainly a whole lot easier for customers to immediately grasp: a brand new iPhone for a dramatically lower price. Everybody gets that. An SE was 46% cheaper than the base iPhone 16. The 16e is only 25% cheaper--that's a huge difference and takes what was an easy decision for price-sensitive shoppers and makes it much more complicated. Do you want the full feature set of the 16 for $200 more? Or the full feature set of the 15 for $100 more? OR: maybe all the new iPhones are too expensive now and you'd rather shop refurbs. Or go to Android. The 16e certainly gives buyers a lot more to think about before making a purchase decision.

All we know for certain right now is that competing in the aggressively lower price point arena was not good business for Apple and so they have abandoned that effort completely. Sales of the SE never equaled those of any of Apple's more expensive iPhones, even the Plus, which is itself on the chopping block due to reported low sales. I'll be very curious to see how Apple markets the 16e and what they'll choose to emphasize about the phone. I think the greatest risk with this phone is the degree to which it might cannibalize sales of the regular iPhone 16. I could imagine that for many shoppers considering the 16, the "e" in the 16e might very well mean it's "enough." 

Apple has a comparison page with the iPhone 14:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-14,iphone-16

The 16e is effectively a replacement for the iPhone 14, which was also sold at $599.

Instead of an older model at a lower price, it's a cut down version of the main model at a lower price. The old SE had an IPS display, moving to OLED had to increase the cost.

There have been some marketshare reports showing the low-end and mini models don't make up much of the overall sales:



https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/iphone-15-sales-figures-show-the-pro-models-have-become-the-default

It's still a lot of people as the total is 250m units so 6% = 15m. Most of these people will eventually buy a larger model, very few would move to Android as they have large screens too.

A lot of people buy on contracts so the price difference is negligible:

https://www.att.com/brand/apple/iphone/

The 6.1" size is bulky but it's the most popular size. There was a poll done here that had 6.1" as the top choice:

https://www.gsmarena.com/weekly_poll_what_is_the_ideal_screen_size_for_a_smartphone-news-57173.php

After using larger displays for a while, the 5.4" mini display felt cramped, especially when typing in portrait but the 5.8" on the iPhone X felt like the largest usable single-handed size. Larger phones (above 2.8" wide) have to be shuffled around or held with one hand to type with the other because they are too wide and it's difficult to do gestures like swipe back on a browser.

If they make a mini model again, it would be good to see a 5.6-5.8" model that is thinner and lighter. It probably still wouldn't be lower than $599 due to the OLED display and higher spec components.

Motion-Ben said:

Anyone know what mo-cap technology is being used? Capturing a whole team, processing the data, and then running it on the headset all with only a half second delay feels leagues ahead of what we're used to seeing.

It's probably the Sony Hawk-Eye pose-tracking system, NBA partnered with them:

https://www.hawkeyeinnovations.com/news/4155239/nba-and-sonys-hawkeye-innovations-launch-strategic-partnership-powering-next-generation-tracking-technology



At 0:25 in the video, it shows the motion tracking and 3D animation.

AppleInsider said:

A new patent filing shows that Apple has been working on a fairly standard external game controller device for Apple Vision Pro, backing up recent rumors of it hoping to partner with Sony.

Tell us that's not a game controller -- image credit: Apple

The neural wristbands that are coming out look like a more comfortable option and could be used for more than games:



They can detect pressure so even if a game was better when holding an object, it can be a passive object. A shooter game can have the player hold a toy gun and it would detect the pressure of pulling the trigger.

A stick would work ok as a controller but it would be better to clip over the knuckles so that it's possible to extend the fingers without dropping the controller, like the etee controller:





A wrist strap is useful to avoid the controller slipping off and hitting something.